Working in the fitness industry and ready to start getting the most out of your online marketing? Then you’re going to need a website that’s been optimized to generate leads as effectively as possible. In this article, we’re going to explain 6 of the most vital things you can do to ensure your gym or personal training website is perfectly tuned to bring in customers and maximize your online revenue. Before we go any further, let’s cover the basics:
What exactly is lead capture?
When potential customers enter your current website, what do they tend to do next? Some will read the information you’ve put up about your brand, some might go straight to chasing down the services they have in mind, and a few might try and contact you right away. As the business owner, the thing you’re most interested in is finding users who are the most keen to sign up and book an order. Lead capture is about building up a list of potential customers that you can effectively pursue and convert into paying customers.
If you have a fitness or personal training website that isn’t optimized to capture leads, you’re basically rolling the dice and have no clear strategy in place for generating revenue. The better your site is at generating leads, the more customers you’re bound to see pouring in from your online efforts. So where do you get started? Here are 6 of the most crucial ways you can optimize your website for great lead generation performance:
1. Add forms to pages that receive the most traffic
Before you do anything else, it’s a good idea to record your current lead generation levels so that you have some way of gauging your progress going forward. Use your preferred analytics tool to have a look through your pages and identify the places that are getting the most traffic, creating the most engagement, and attracting the most prospects to your brand. These are some great places to start your analysis:
Emails:
See how many users are clicking on your emails and landing on your website. Not marketing with email yet? Email is still one of the best strategies for pulling in new prospects online so it’s never a bad time to jump on board.
Social Media:
How many users are engaging with your social campaigns and coming to your site through your strongest social pages?
Content posts:
Have you been creating videos or blog posts? Then you’ve probably been receiving a large portion of your traffic coming through from these sources.
Once you’ve tracked down the most popular pages you have on your website and understand why people are finding them, these are the pages you’ll want to focus your initial optimization work. If people are coming to your pages because you’ve caught their attention for a particular reason, then the pages they arrive on need to continue feeding their interest in whatever interest has pulled them in.
It’s on your most popular pages that you should be offering further longer-form content that users can only access through forms. By completing these forms, users provide you with their most up-to-date contact information and prove their intent to learn more about this particular area. This is one of the simplest and most effective tactics for generating leads.
2. Measure lead generation performance
As soon as you start actively building a list of leads, you need to start monitoring your lead generation performance. You can only optimize if you have a good idea of where you are right now and have some way of deciphering how you can improve. You should use tools like Website Grader, This handy app measures your lead generation pages and then throws you pointers for where your current content could be sharpened up.
Testing landing pages against each other is also a very good idea. As soon as you see one page performing relatively well, compare it to others and try to identify the differences that are making an impact. For example, let’s say one of your pages is getting hundreds of hits and is converting really well, while one of your other pages gets a similar volume of traffic but doesn’t convert, you’ll need to compare these pages thoroughly to identify what’s working and what isn’t.
The other very important areas to measure are total landing page visits, the volume of clicks on each call-to-action (CTA), and the level of engagement seen by each “thank-you page”. By scouring through these key metrics, you’ll be able to determine which elements are performing the best and then you’ll know exactly which types of content you need to have more of a focus on going forward.
3. Break down your lead generation process into steps
When dealing in lead capture, the customer journey is king. If a customer finds your content because they’ve conducted a search for yoga classes, but then you direct them to a page on your personal training website about heavy lifting, you can imagine the kind of impact this lack of cohesion would have. You want to offer people the things they’re looking for, so understanding the customer’s journey throughout your pages is very important.
The more you break your customer’s conversion path down into stages, the better you’ll be able to capitalize on making offers that users actually want, which can catapult conversions by as much as 27%. Split testing is one way to get going. Make two versions of every landing page you want to optimize, this is usually called an A/B test. There are certain pieces of the lead generation process that you’ll want to focus your initial testing on. Here’s how to nail each of these key landing page areas:
Call-to-action
An example of a call-to-action (CTA) is, “start your free trial today by clicking here now”. These CTA phrases tell the user what to do in order to benefit from taking action right away. They are very powerful when used correctly and sparingly. You’ll need to make sure this text stands out big time! You can consider placing it in a different font or color and it’s definitely worth giving each and every word you use some serious attention. Simplicity is the main goal with calls-to-action and tools like Canva will help you create impactful CTA-style images easily and quickly for free.
Landing page content
The more landing pages you practice designing, the better. These pages need to be very focused on delivering the exact information visitors are looking for in a concise way. Contact information should be clear and the next phase of the buying process should be very clearly outlined as the main focus of the page.
Need a bit more help coming up with ideas? Check out this great list of good landing pages examples you can take notes from. Of course, when building a new gym or personal training website design, you’ll need to think about what people really want from your services and how you can offer a USP (unique selling point). This is where scoping out the local competition can really help steer you in the right direction.
Kickback Email
As soon as someone signs up, you’ll want to send them an email prompting them to share some of your content. People are more receptive when they’ve just found you compared to when you’re trying to contact them cold, so take advantage while you’re in favor.
4. Your homepage should feature a very simple CTA
If you notice the homepage on your fitness or personal training website is receiving huge volumes of landing traffic, then you need to place a CTA on it that gets those users to take action. People who’ve just found you often don’t want to be pushed towards a pile of long-from content (huge volumes of text about different fitness ideas). In most cases, they’ll already know what they’re looking for and just want the quickest route to finding it.
So how do you get them to sign up to more content without pushing anything heavy? This is where personal trainer website design takes a little creativity. It’s all about choosing a CTA that invites them to access something they’ll find very useful in future. Let’s take a look at a few ideas you can use:
Subscribe for updates
Even if they’re not quite ready to make a booking when they first find you, they’re showing an interest in what you do and are likely to continue their search once they’ve gathered the most crucial information they’re looking for. If you place yourself as a point of helpful guidance regarding the subject they’re interested in, they’ll like the idea of staying in tune while making a final buying decision. That’s exactly what this “subscribe for updates” CTA is designed to offer.
Try us for free
People are very easy to “push away” with overly salesly tactics nowadays. Sell too hard and you’re bound to send bounce rates up (the number of people leaving your page very soon after they enter). Offering something for free is a great way to invite users to engage further at no extra cost. This can be especially powerful on a fitness or personal training website because a lot of these leads will be first-timers.
Most people find it very tempting to try something for free especially if they think it will help them decide while weighing up options. Hook them in and the odds are in your favor to be option #1 when they’re ready to buy. Look around and you’ll notice the best gym and personal training websites often offer free sessions to get newbies through the doors and exploring the service without commitment.
5. Develop a live chat service for your website
Ever visited a website and been greeted right away by a window that introduces you to a friendly customer service agent that’s ready to respond to any questions you can think to type in? That’s a live chat service. These features are increasing in popularity not just because they’re more accessible than ever, but more importantly because of their ability to turn visitors into customers.
To use live chats most effectively, you’re going to need to identify the pages on your site that seem to hold the attention of your users most. These are likely to be the pages where users are looking for the most explanation and detail, which is exactly where a live chat system will come in handy. Not only will you be able to keep a log on all user queries to stay up-to-date on what your potential customers are looking for, but you’ll also be able to identify individuals that require the most assistance.
Have your actual customer service team integrate with the auto-response bot on your fitness or personal training site and you’ll be able to offer a level of customer service that’s perfectly placed to convert like a charm.
6. Nurture your leads
A certain percentage of people who enter your site will be ready to buy right away and it’s definitely crucial to target them. But it’s also just as crucial that you target leads that are still making up their minds or not yet ready to act. Collecting contact details and issuing valuable content to these users over time is usually known as a providing them a “workflow” or “nurturing” them. The more effort you put into nurturing potential customers, the greater the number of prospects you’ll eventually turn into customers.
Once you have a users email address, you can begin nurturing them by following up with emails related to their interests. As long as you offer them something hugely beneficial and directly related to the content they’ve consumed most, they’ll keep your brand in mind as a leading option.
Use thank you pages to bolster your nurturing efforts
The “thank you page” is often deployed once a lead completes a sign-up. It’s the last thing they see on your website before they make their way elsewhere, so it’s where you need to start the whole nurturing process. The best personal training websites will have killer thank you pages that give the user a slice of your caring and friendly personality.
As well as saying thank you, you’ll want to ensure you give the user the option to engage with something that keeps them connected to your brand as much as possible. Further reading for them to download or links to your most impressive social pages are both great tactics to consider. You don’t want the user to feel overwhelmed, but you’d like them to take something away with them should they decide to leave. If they follow you on a social platform or download an Ebook, they’ll have something on their mind to look into later.
That’s our 6! These are the most vital ways you can start to optimize your fitness or personal training website for lead generation. It can seem daunting to some, but once you get things rolling and on the right track, you’re sure to benefit from more leads, higher conversions, and greater online revenue. Have more questions? Feel free to get in touch or leave a comment below for more advice!
